


There Was Glory

by Lomonaaeren



Series: Cloak and Dagger [11]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Aurors, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-13
Updated: 2014-10-13
Packaged: 2018-02-21 02:13:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2450906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A week ago, there was a confrontation in the Auror Department, a confrontation that left two people dead and some worse than dead. Isla Rudie, Ginny Weasley, Harry, and Draco reflect on the mess their lives have become.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There Was Glory

**Author's Note:**

> Another part of the Cloak and Dagger series. Don't read this until you have finished The Library of Hades.

Isla leaned her head in her hands, palms pressed to her flushed and flaming cheeks, and tried to think through the weariness that clouded her mind. When was the last time she had slept?   
  
But the answer to that came back. She had slept last night, sprawled over her desk, among files that spoke of Aurors in the past and those Dark wizards that the Ministry recognized as twisted under the modern definition. But she had last slept  _well_ the night before Nicolette went rogue.  
  
Isla shook her head and sat up, digging into the files again. There had to be  _something_  here that could help Nicolette. Yes, she had gone mad, but that was what twisted did, and Isla did not think it made her irreclaimable. If she could only concentrate long enough, delve deep enough, find the answers about necromancy that the Ministry hadn’t found because it was too scared of that forbidden art to research it adequately…  
  
The door to the Socrates office opened. Isla looked up and stared blankly. Draco Malfoy stood there. Isla hadn’t seen him in a week, since Nicolette had left. He had been hurt badly in the confrontation with Blue Eyes, a twisted who had been their former Head Auror, and was said to be under the care of a Mind-Healer. It had been his partner, Harry Potter, who spoke with Isla about Nicolette and admitted that what happened to her was partially their fault, since they had encouraged her to use her necromancy in the service of their investigation.  
  
Harry looked away from her as though the weight of his guilt dragged his eyes to the floor. From the way Malfoy considered her, guilt might as well have never troubled him. Isla found herself sitting up, responding without thought to the challenge in his face. She wondered what words would come out of his mouth next. Scorn for her own guilt? Blame for her failure? The old contempt that was so often aimed by pure-bloods at Muggleborns who had done well in the Ministry?  
  
“Yes?” Isla asked, when he only went on looking at her. “If you want to go to your desk, I’m not about to stop you.” She turned back to her flies, building up a barrier of paper between him and her that she intended to keep going as high and long as necessary. He was  _not_ going to make her back down or regret the way she had spoken to Potter. It was true that he might not have been able to prevent Nicolette from turning into a twisted, but he could have made fewer demands on her when he saw the toll the necromancy took.  
  
And he was the only one out of that partnership that had  _cared._ Malfoy only sneered and asked more and more of Nicolette. Of course, if anyone in the world existed for Malfoy besides Harry Potter, Isla hadn’t noticed yet.  
  
She heard his footsteps crossing the floor, but he stopped in front of her desk. Isla snarled and looked up with her wand almost drawn. He was  _not_ going to intimidate her when he was the one who had done something wrong.  
  
Malfoy leaned over the desk and gave her another even look. Isla simply stared back at him, hands worked so tightly around her wand that they hurt.  
  
“When we hunt her down,” Malfoy said softly, “we will give first choice of the kill to you.”  
  
Isla stared some more, before she realized that he hadn’t flinched or acted as if he was joking. “You think I  _want_ that?” she asked. There was bitterness in her throat, coating it with a metallic taste. She swallowed and shook her head. “Of  _course_ I don’t. I want Nicolette back. I want everything that you’ve helped take away from me. I want her back to normal, and sane again.”  
  
Malfoy studied her some more, then stepped back. “If you can find a way to get her back,” he said, “then I will offer you admiration as an original researcher.” He paused again. “But I doubt you will. And if a hand has to bring her down, if someone has to kill her, then I thought it would be better if it was someone who loved her.”  
  
He turned away, took up the paperwork from his desk that it seemed he’d come to collect, and left.   
  
Isla shut her eyes. There was now a new and disturbing thing pulsing behind her eyes, one that had nothing to do with most of the thoughts that had occupied her this week.  
  
She disdained most of the things pure-bloods said to her, because those things were intended to praise their own intelligence and sometimes their own tolerance for interacting with her at all, small and Mudblooded person that she was. But this was a gift. Being offered as such, anyway, although Isla could feel the edges.  
  
 _Then again…  
  
Those orientation sessions I had to go through said that pure-bloods valued knives as gifts. And arrows. And other kinds of blades._  
  
She had to spend a long time breathing before she could go back to work, but she did have a sharper mind than before, a stronger sense of what she was doing. Perhaps a mental knife could cut through mental tangles.  
  
*  
  
Ginny turned away from the mirror and shook her head, sitting down at her table. It was no good. She still couldn’t face her reflection without seeing a flash of blue in the depths of her brown eyes, although she was sure there was nothing there. Harry had explained all about the blue-eyed twisted to her, and something of what his work now entailed, and Ginny thought even someone insane would stay away for a while after the blow he had been dealt.  
  
But the thought that made her want to rake her fingers across her face and tear up flowers by the roots wasn’t that. It was simply that, once again, someone had seized her mind and used her as a weapon against her friends.   
  
“At least I wasn’t paralyzing people, here,” she muttered.  
  
And at least the single memory she had of being under the twisted’s control was the sensation of sliminess. Otherwise, there were only gaps in her recollections, covering the Floo call that Ernhardt had made to Harry in her body and her position in the office during the fight. She would have fewer bad dreams of this than she had of Tom Riddle’s possession.  
  
 _A small consolation._  
  
Ginny stood up and turned towards her garden. While the mood to tear flowers out had passed, the mood to  _do something_ had not. That meant she was going to tend the flowers, and send dirt flying, and kill pests, and tear up weeds.   
  
Getting out into the open air, under the sunlight and the clouds, did her good. She rooted in the soil and came up clutching heaping handfuls of it, which she tossed into the far side of the garden in a rolling cloud. She would use her wand, later, to smooth it around the plants that needed it and ensure everything was deeply rooted enough. But for right now, she wanted the sheer pleasure of doing something that  _seemed_ like destruction, no matter what it actually felt like.  
  
She came to the base of the tall red-purple flowers that Michael had gifted her with and left her hand lying on the stalks for a long time, instead of backing away and going back to work as she had promised herself she would.   
  
No, Ginny decided, while her hand lingered. There was no point in thinking about it now. That part of her life was long over.  
  
There had been a thrill in it, she had to admit. Who would have thought of the nothing-but-good Ginny Weasley selling illegal Potions ingredients, or using her house to hide some of the people engaged in the trade? She’d never taken risks, or at least no more risks than the danger of the business implied. She’d never done anything that would make her lie to Harry, or to Ron when he was still an Auror.  
  
And anyway, she had quit that when Michael finally moved away for the last time. She could do it with contacts she saw only occasionally, but not when she knew no one from the past.  
  
Then the blue-eyed twisted had found her.  
  
Ginny shook her head. She knew there were people, maybe even including Ron, who would say that she deserved what had happened to her because of what she had participated in in the past. As though Ernhardt would possess only those with some sin in their backgrounds, or only use the minds of people he thought were like him. No one could seriously believe that. Everyone was sorry for her.  
  
 _Except you._  
  
Ginny shivered. No one else blamed her, but she blamed herself.  
  
Perhaps she could have said something that would have made things clear, the first time Harry and Malfoy came to her door. Perhaps she could have let them know that Michael was involved in _some_ crimes and had reason to flee to the Continent, but he never did them anymore, and only kept moving out of fear that even Ginny, who had reason to fear what her family would say if they found out, thought was paranoia. Perhaps she could have let them know about her. It would have given them more idea of what to look for when Ernhardt took her prisoner, anyway, thinking to use her against Harry.  
  
But she had stopped being open with her family and her former boyfriends—except the ones actually involved in the smuggling—a long time ago. They wanted her to be something she wasn’t, the happy wife and mother, the Gryffindor who was no good at Potions, the woman who had no secrets.  
  
Not the woman who still woke screaming from memories of Tom Riddle, and who, in her dreams, sometimes took his hand.  
  
Ginny sighed and turned back into the house. She would give things a month or two to calm down, for Harry and Malfoy to try and catch Ernhardt. She had no doubt they would manage in that time. Harry had always been a good Auror, and Malfoy seemed fit to partner him, loathe though Ginny was to admit that.  
  
And then she would begin the search for Michael again. For reasons that had to do with fear for his safety, and for—others.  
  
*  
  
“Brooding is unattractive, you know.”  
  
Harry blinked and looked up. He’d been sitting at his own desk, in his own house, looking around and remembering the Shadowborn who had intruded here right before he and Draco fled. It was good to be here, and not in Draco’s home or the tiny bolthole he’d shown Draco when they were on the run.  
  
“I thought you were going to the office,” he said, watching Draco close the door behind him and stalk towards Harry’s desk.  
  
“I did,” Draco said, and didn’t stop his stalking. In the end, he was the one standing over the desk and leaning forwards, and Harry was the one leaning back, trying to ignore the feeling that Draco would pounce on him if he moved wrong. “But after I gathered the paperwork up and set Rudie’s mind straight about Macgeorge, then I was free to come back here.”  
  
Harry frowned. “What did you say to Rudie?” Draco had ignored her most of the time since she’d been in the Socrates Corps, though Harry had never been able to tell if that was because she was relatively young, not his partner, a Muggleborn, or a combination of all three.  
  
“Only the truth,” Draco said, and gave him a nasty smile. “Do you want me to tell you the truth, too, so you’ll stop brooding and clucking to yourself about how this was your fault and you should have seen through Ernhardt earlier?”  
  
Harry swallowed, and tried to ignore the fast-beating, almost sick excitement in his stomach. “Go ahead.”  
  
Draco nodded, and began counting points off on his fingers. “Ernhardt has been trying to stop you for months, it looks like now, beginning with your reassignment to the Socrates Corps. That included assigning me as your partner, trying to kill you, and ordering the Shadowborn to hunt us down. Feeling guilty because he also seized on Weasley is ridiculous. She’s collateral damage that you had no way of knowing would become collateral damage, because Ernhardt’s targets of possession were so strange and apparently random.”  
  
“I still could have done something to warn Ron and Hermione and Ginny,” Harry whispered. “When we began to suspect that Blue Eyes was after us  _specifically_ , and that he didn’t just try to kill us when we crossed his path—”  
  
“I’m not done,” Draco said, and he gave Harry a look that made him shut up, although it wasn’t as bad as some of the other glares Draco had given him in the past. “No, you couldn’t have warned them, not when we’re supposed to keep the details of our cases confidential. Besides, do you think that Weasley would have believed you? The girl Weasley? Honestly, now,” he added, when Harry opened his mouth.  
  
Harry hesitated, then closed it, grimacing. “No,” he admitted. Ginny had acted strange when he and Draco went to her house, even when they were only investigating an ordinary case, as far as they knew. And he and she hadn’t really been close for years before that. He’d wanted to think they were, but—they weren’t.  
  
“Not without the proof that you couldn’t give,” Draco said, nodding, and thus being more generous to Ginny than Harry was expecting and more generous to Harry than Harry thought he deserved. “So you needn’t feel guilty, unless you’re also going to feel guilty about the damage I suffered.”  
  
“Do you think I  _don’t_?” Harry stood. It was true that he’d talked more about Ginny in the past week, but he’d thought that was because he was telling Draco how he felt with the way he touched him, held him, lay against him at night. “Do you think—”  
  
Draco raised an eyebrow and gave him that look again, but this time Harry’s words were in full flood and he couldn’t be stopped by something like that.   
  
“What happened to you hurts,” Harry spat him. “You can think it’s all guilt if you want, but it’s also  _anger._ I want to hunt down Ernhardt, or Macgeorge, or whatever we should call them now, and destroy them right now. You shouldn’t have been hurt like that. You  _never_ should have been hurt like that.”  
  
Draco eyed him for a moment. Then he said, “I agreed to it when I channeled the Dark power in the Atrium. It was the same pain.”  
  
“But in his office you were bearing it by yourself, instead of having me to share it,” Harry said. “You suffered too much from it. Yes, I heard what Mind-Healer Estillo said. That you were lucky to keep your mind.”  
  
“And I had to have Healing potions, and I had to spend a few days in bed,” Draco agreed, nodding. “That doesn’t mean that I’m damaged  _now_. It doesn’t mean you’ve done something unforgivable to me, Harry. I was the one who chose to take on Ernhardt in his office, to take the chance of destroying him. You didn’t make me.”  
  
“If I’d been less paralyzed by the sight of Ginny standing next to him—”  
  
Draco laughed, harsh and deep. “Somehow I don’t think girl Weasley would thank you for the insinuation that I’m more important to you than she is.”  
  
Harry swallowed. “But you are.”  
  
*  
  
If there was any sentence Draco had never expected to hear Harry say, it was that one.  
  
He paused and stared at Harry. Harry stared back, his hands forming a tight little circle in front of him, as though he didn’t know what Draco was expecting him to say, but which told Draco he wouldn’t take the words back, either.  
  
For the most part, they didn’t talk about Harry’s friends, the same way they didn’t talk about Draco’s family. Harry was still on good terms with the Weasleys and Granger, but they simply didn’t fit into the terms of the partnership he and Draco had built. When Harry went over to their houses for dinner, Draco spent the evening looking at paperwork. Harry never spent the night, he always came back, and that was enough for him. He knew that trying to force Harry to choose would drive him away.  
  
But now Harry had done it, without any prompting from Draco, and the way he winced and looked down said he had done something that made him feel uncomfortable, but not something that was against his will. Draco had learned to read the difference, especially since they had started having sex.  
  
“I’m flattered,” Draco said, at last. “But it’s not something you need to say to her.” He pictured the scene that Harry saying that to Weasley would cause, because, after all, he was only human, but regretfully had to put it aside. It would cause  _too_ much trouble and pain, and then Harry would get all torn up over Weasley again just when he should have begun to put the guilt aside. “And I don’t want you blaming yourself for what happened to me.”  
  
Harry swallowed. Then he said, “I still want to hurt him. I still want to arrest him.”  
  
Draco smiled. “ _That_ part, you can hold onto. I wanted to tell you that the Ministry has definitely offered us our jobs back, conditional on our making Macgeorge—or Ernhardt—we really must come up with some way to refer to that blended entity—the object of our next hunt.”  
  
Harry took an eager step forwards, and then stopped. “Are you sure you want to get that near him again?” he asked, looking doubtfully at Draco’s hands, as if they might shake and tremble the way they had for the first three days after the onslaught of pain. “I’ll understand perfectly if you want to stay behind.”  
  
Draco rolled his eyes. “And then they won’t let you hunt him anyway, because you’ll have no partner. No, Harry. I can bear this.” He could, too. It wasn’t Ernhardt that made him wake up gasping at night and need the warmth of Harry against his back to make him stop shivering, it was the memory of the pain, and he hoped they would know better than to try and use that method of capture against Ernhardt again. “What I want to know is how we’re going to do it. Under the Ministry’s auspices? Openly?”  
  
Harry considered him for a long, slow moment. Then he said, “No. I mean, the Ministry will know that we’re hunting him, but doing it  _that_ openly isn’t likely to take us to the places where he’ll be hiding.”  
  
Draco nodded. “What do you have in mind?”  
  
Harry blinked. “You’re asking  _me_?”  
  
“Why did you think I would lead the hunt?” Draco asked wryly. In truth, he was out of ideas, and he had brought up this one mainly to shock Harry out of the guilt-induced haze that he suspected he would fall into otherwise. “I could name a few places she might have gone if she was still Macgeorge, but I think we have to assume that every trace of the personality and soul that she used to be is gone.”  
  
Harry nodded. “We killed his—home body, and I think he’s taken Macgeorge as his new one. He wouldn’t want to leave behind a spirit that could maybe challenge him and take the body back when he goes out on possession expeditions.”  
  
Draco cocked the head. “It does make me wonder about the notes you took during your interview with Morningstar.”  
  
“That nonsense?” Harry blinked at him. “You know I can’t remember the interview with her, Draco, only what I wrote down. That was her flaw. Do you think she might really have been telling the truth? That she went into the future, and that’s where Ernhardt captured her?”  
  
“I think it’s worth looking into.”  
  
Harry smiled at him, and reached out to lay his hands on Draco’s shoulders. “Then you had the idea, and you’re the leader after all,” he murmured, and kissed him.  
  
Draco held onto him, and kissed him back.  
  
And he tried to tell him all the things he needed to, without words: the slant of Rudie’s head as she bent over the files that she hoped would free her partner, and which Draco knew never would; the way that Harry’s glazed eyes when he looked at Draco still hurting from the link with Ernhardt would always stay with him; how Harry’s mouth curled and how a mere glimpse of that touched him; the strength that flowed through them both, binding them like links of one chain, and how much stronger they were together than apart.  
  
He tried to say that, and knew he had succeeded when Harry moved back and smiled at him, breathlessly.  
  
“We’ll hunt them,” Harry said quietly, his fingers winding in Draco’s hair. “We’ll find them. And we’ll kill Ernhardt if Rudie can’t.”  
  
Draco nodded, and leaned against Harry for a moment. He had felt shaky and ashy after that immense pain, as though a fire that had burned in him had worked down to embers. Mostly it had been the thought of losing Macgeorge that had done it, and how easily Harry could have died along the way.  
  
But it was past now, and where a fire had been, a fire could spring.  
  
He would rekindle the ashes.  
  
 _No,_ he thought then as he met Harry’s eyes and found Harry smiling at him for real, for the first time in a week.  _We’ll rekindle them, together._  
  
 **The End.**


End file.
